It is a kind of weird phenomenon that at some point of the construction, my models start to fight me :/ The recent weeks were full of frustration and ardly any real progress!
Here's the first hint of trouble with the decals. Berna Decals' fin stripes wouldn't fit. I was able to rectify the problem by cutting each decal in the lower and upper half and applying them separately. With liberal amounts of setting solution, I was able to gat that nice painted-on look. I can see now that I was lucky to have painted the rudder white in the first place.
The Berna decals looked great on paper. Unfortunately, upon application of the roundels it became obvious that the white printed backdrop of these decals was of smaller diameter than the red, resulting in an ugly transluscent red outline. I tried to rectify this by applying another roundel on top of the first one, but this didn't bring much improvement.
My chosen markings were that of Lt Valentin of GC II/7, an a/c that featured a white letter "V" on the fuselage behind the cockpit (
http://www.histavia21.net/HISTAV2/D.520Valentin.JPG ). I planned to obtain the "V" by trimming and reversing the "A" decal from the Berna sheet, adding some serifs afterwards from the remaining white bits on the sheet. That looked like a simple simple operation, but ended up in a disaster - the decals were again transluscent, and the application of serifs on top of them resulted in ugly uneven paint coverage. Trying to save the results, I attempted mask and paints the serifs, whereupon the decals broke apart. Now the damage was too great so I had no choice but to sand down and repaint the entire area!
I tried to improve the roundels by masking them off and spraying the red color with Tamiya Red whcih proved to be a good match. This improved the look of the markings to an acceptable level.
After the failure with Valentin's markings, I looked for alternatives among my remaining decals, still hoping to end up with a machine that fought during the 1940 campaign. The original Tamiya sheet, by Vitachrome, was rather poor in many respects but offered the markings of S/Lt Madon of GC I/3 from his North African period (with white arrow on the fuselage), buit the same machine served in the Battle of France (
http://s1.e-monsite.com/2009/04/01/10/89675495d520-dekker-10-jpg.jpg ), so this became my new choice.
I picked the fuselage emblem and the blue "2" on the fin from the Vitachrome sheet. Again, the "2"s proved very brittle indeeed, one of the breaking apart on application but luckily I managed to save it!
The snake emblem decal was very simplified - a simple red-brown silhouette on white background with the same red-brown outline. The original snake was probably black with yellow dots and the emplem outlined in yellow. I decided that this could be achieved by hand-painting some detail on the snake plus a new outline made of yellow Xtradecal stripes. However, at this stage I'm pleased with my approximation, and most of all - happy to get out of this decal hell!
